CDP Institute

Speaking of Slack integration, digital asset management vendor MediaValet just announced their own Slack connection.  It will allow collaborative comments, workflows, and approvals.  That seems like a fairly natural use for Slack. 

Let’s catch up with news about AI in programmatic advertising.  Starting with a company the cutest name, Gravity4 has launched Mona Lisa, a digital assistant that forecasts which programmatic media channels will yield the best results.  She’s one smart lady, doing automated lookalike modeling, lead scoring, collaborative filtering, classification, regression, decision trees, recommendation engines, clustering, topic modeling and sequential pattern mining on data from 19 countries.  Gravity4 assembles customer data from social, CRM, email, mobile, and advertising apps based on at least fifteen acquisitions since 2014.

Programmatic display and retargeting vendor MainAd named its new tool Logico, which isn’t cute at all. It applies machine learning to individual profiles, using the results to predict individual behaviors and adjust ad bids accordingly. MainAd calls itself an ad tech company but apparently creates custom campaigns for each client, making it more like an agency.

When it comes to naming products, TVSquared is either super-ironic or just doesn’t care: they call their new prediction tool “Predict”. It draws on TVSquared’s worldwide database of direct response TV ad results to “predict” (get it?) which buys will generate the most response. Then it then executes the purchases.

A shared customer database – that is, a Customer Data Platform – is in place at 15% of B2B firms that responded to a recent survey by MarTech Advisor.

Private investment firm Centerbridge Partners has purchased enterprise data management vendor Syncsort, which itself purchased data quality and identity management vendor Trillium in late 2016. The $1.26 billion transaction also includes disaster recovery expert Vision Solutions, which will be merged into Syncsort. Both firms had been owned by the Clearlake investment group. This continues the pattern of private investors buying and consolidating martech-related firms. Maybe this is the way the boom ends.

Freemium software has traditionally been used to promote simple products with mass appeal.

Voice recognition isn’t new, but it’s much more important now that devices like Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri are capturing consumer intent.  (See this blog post for a deeper analysis.)  So it’s worth noting that Adobe Analytics can now extract information from speech captured on voice-enabled devices.  This will make it easier for companies other than the device owners to use data from those interactions, assuming the outsiders are granted access to what’s said.

Virtual reality is even cooler than voice recognition but it’s harder to collect payments. So you’ll be pleased (or horrified) to learn that payment processor Payscout has found a way for people to use their Visa cards within a VR environment. You can wander the virtual aisles and test out the virtual products and then pay with real money without removing your headset. How great is that?

Here’s another modern miracle: ScopeMedia has launched ScopeStyle, a “visual fashion discovery platform” that not only searches the Web for products similar to a photo you upload, but also finds complementary items to complete the outfit based on your style preferences. If you think about what’s required, it’s an awesomely impressive achievement for artificial intelligence. On the other hand, many of us have parents, friends, or spouses who offer similar critiques for free.

Well, here’s a blast from the past: Marquis was one of many PC-based MCIF (Marketing Customer Information File) systems launched in the mid-1990s.

Speaking of old school: predictive ecommerce vendor Windsor Circle, which specializes in customer retention and upsell, announced it is now using split tests and reporting on revenue lift as an alternative to attribution for measuring the value of marketing efforts. They seem to feel this is new, although it was part of Marquis and other MCIFs in 1990s and a direct marketing best practice for decades before that.